Final Fantasy Friday: Final Fantasy Tarot – XI Justice

This is my current Final Fantasy Friday post where I’ll be discussing which characters I think exemplify each card of the Major Arcana. If this is your first time here, please head over to my Final Fantasy Tarot page for explanation. Now onto the next card!

It didn’t take much for me to pick Gabranth from FFXII as the representative of Justice for both surface and complexity reasons. They say justice is blind, and this is supposed to be good, but Gabranth is blind in a fell way. He’s blinded with hatred for his twin brother Basch for abandoning him and their sickly mother to join the Dalamascan army. On the surface the judge magister appears unaffected, but just as clean gloves hide dirty hands, dark armor can hide your true heart.

Justice as a concept is always purported to be simple, but it rarely is no matter how much we wish it to be. While Gabranth appears to just be another faceless antagonist of the Empire, beneath lies a conflicted man. In the end (which I won’t give away since I just skimmed it myself), he does figure out how to balance the scales, making peace with Basch and himself.

Alternates: Golbez (IV), Sephiroth (VII)

It’s hard not to think of Golbez alongside Gabranth since their stories are so similar. The (initial) antagonist of FFIV abhors his brother (who doesn’t even remember him) for “killing” their mother during child birth, as Gabranth hates his for (essentially) killing her with his desertion (seriously…Final Fantasy plays that missing mother card in spades especially in VII and beyond).

With missing mothers and justice, I of course think of Sephiroth. Though I didn’t pick him for this card, it’s hard to ignore that his mad quest for godhood was due to the belief of dispossession for himself and the eldritch abomination he believed was his mother. When you realize he thought it was the true last Cetra and was trying to take the Planet back for it, the story becomes both ironic and tragic.

LightningEllen takes the gold this week with her guess of FFXII’s judge magister!

Halfway Scores

As promised I will now provide the scores thus far and my scoring methodology. Guessing the exact character nets you 5 points, guessing an alternative is 3, and guessing a character from the game of the correct answer earns you 1 point. So if you guessed Golbez for this card, you’d get 3 points because it’s one of my alt picks, but if you guessed Basch you’d get 1 since you at least were in the same game.

Mr. Panda: 29 points with 10 guesses – so far Mr. Panda is the only person to have guessed in all of the questions, and he has the most points. Coincidence? I think not 🙂

LightningEllen: 14 points with 6 guesses – coming in second place is LightningEllen (who isn’t doing nearly as bad as she thinks!). Six questions answered nets a tidy sum.

Hungrygoriya: 5 points with 2 guesses – 5 points in this case means that one question was answered perfectly and that’s nothing to sneeze at!

Sure! In a nutshell it’s one of the first franchises to tell a story using the medium of video games. In a smaller nutshell it’s beautiful people running around and doing epic things hehe. Seriously, the story telling quality is at or above the level of many novels I’ve read. They weave history, mythology, and religious symbolism almost seamlessly into their plots, leaving many things up for interpretation and for fangirls like to me to write essays over 🙂

Glad I’m managing to provide some information about it in a way that’s coherent!

I forgot he kidnapped Marlene! I remember the Keystone because there’s a section in the guide called The Cat and the Keystone, and I always thought that would be a great title for a story. I also live in the Keystone state and you see them EVERYWHERE lol.